Hard drive failure

Hi all,

I mentioned having to keep renewing my hard drives on here a couple of months ago as for some reason after a little while (about a month or two) of working fine, they just start stuttering the music, and half way through a track it sounds like a scratched record, repeating the same second of music time after time.
My software is centrafuse, and everything seems ok, but i cant think it be anything other than the HDD.

I've tried sata and IDE, both happened.

I've also tried doing a system restore point, and also a disk cleanup and a defrag, no problems with the disk at all???

Unless anyone has any other ideas i thought about trying the O/S install on a 4gb sd card. Will this be slow running through a usb sd card reader? will it write the O/S to 4gb storage?
Would my best bet be norton ghost and rebuilding the o/s onto the sd card??

Do you have a pick up or a vehicle with stiffer suspension?
Obviously shock on a Hard drive is really bad. Consider moving you computer to the center of your car. Like under you driver seat. This is usually an Ideal spot, since it will be in your climate controlled cabin of the car and normally the spot that shakes and has the least impacts when hitting those annoying bumps in the road.
Just a thought... maybe I am wrong.

To answer your question on the SD idea, ditch it. SD is super slow, go with a Compact flash card or a Solid State Hard Drive if you really think this is your last resort.

I mentioned having to keep renewing my hard drives on here a couple of months ago as for some reason after a little while (about a month or two) of working fine, they just start stuttering the music, and half way through a track it sounds like a scratched record, repeating the same second of music time after time.
My software is centrafuse, and everything seems ok, but i cant think it be anything other than the HDD.

I've tried sata and IDE, both happened.

I've also tried doing a system restore point, and also a disk cleanup and a defrag, no problems with the disk at all???

Unless anyone has any other ideas i thought about trying the O/S install on a 4gb sd card. Will this be slow running through a usb sd card reader? will it write the O/S to 4gb storage?
Would my best bet be norton ghost and rebuilding the o/s onto the sd card??

Are you sure this is hard drive related? I don't know that a song "skipping" could really be caused by a hard drive read error. Typically, a music program will read an entire mp3 into memory on a single read from the hard drive, and then play the song entirely from memory...it's not like the drive is continually reading the disk as the song is played (so, not like a record or CD player). Furthermore, even if you were receiving bad data from the hard drive, or difficulty accessing some part of the disk, I think that the music player would simply reach the end of the available data and then stop playing...not repeat playing a small fraction of the data that it already has in memory.

I'd investigate other causes first, especially since the drive checks out diagnostically. The sort of damage caused when a drive fails due to shock typically would show up on a full diagnostic of the drive, if it's severe enough to cause interruption of data reads. So, some questions:

does this happen on a particular mp3/set of mp3s/mp3s from a particular encoder?

when it does happen, can you skip to another mp3 successfully?

does the OS or any software you're running crash when or shortly after the mp3 skips?

can you replicate the skip by driving over the same section of road, at the same speed, that originally caused the skip?

when replacing your hard drives, are you doing a fresh install of all components, or are you ghosting an older drive image to the new drive?

i had skipping problems in my car at one point to. It actually boiled down to the WiFi periodically looking for a connection (when it doesn't have a connection). I disabled my WiFi connection and no more skipping! I turn my WiFi on when I need to connect it to the internet. I have a shortcut on the desktop to My Network Connections to enable and disable the device with ease

Just wanted to confirm, it was the phonecontrol application that was causing the problem...and with centrafuse soon to be releasing a new phone technology, hopefully this will resolve the problem.

I removed the phonecontrol app, and it all worked fine again. very weird how it worked fine for over a month then crashed out and went fuzzy. Either way. At least this has saved me keep buying a new hard drive. thanks guys!

Just wanted to confirm, it was the phonecontrol application that was causing the problem...and with centrafuse soon to be releasing a new phone technology, hopefully this will resolve the problem.

I removed the phonecontrol app, and it all worked fine again. very weird how it worked fine for over a month then crashed out and went fuzzy. Either way. At least this has saved me keep buying a new hard drive. thanks guys!

I am coming in a bit late and parkgsm went through everything I would have said in regards to diagnosing the problem further as it sounded like something other than the HD. He even said it more clearly and eloquently than I could have ever managed.

One thing I will note however is that CF and SD are not good mediums for OSs which can not be mounted read only. I have myself killed and seen many CF cards die as a result of such usage. You can get IDE to CF and IDE to CF to SD adapters so you can bypass USB altogether, however if your OS is going to be doing much writing you will likely have a high rate of failure in your cards.

SSD is likely too costly to consider at the moment, at least it is for me. Places like Logicsupply do sell industrial CF/IDEFlash solutions but HDs seem to be prevalent and cheap enough that you could stick with them until you had to find a different solution.